Royal Lee: What the Father of Holistic Nutrition Predicted About Chronic Illness
Five Insights From the Brilliant — and Suppressed — Work of Dr. Royal Lee
Dr. Royal Lee promoted a whole food diet and warned of the link between food adulteration and chronic illness decades ago | Photo from ch_ch on Shutterstock
Introduction
At the opening of a seminar on holistic nutrition a few days ago, our instructor opened with a quote by someone I had never heard of:
“One of the biggest tragedies of human civilization is the precedence of chemical therapy over nutrition.” — Dr. Royal Lee
Through a quick google search, I was surprised to see that Dr. Lee was not only considered the “Father of Holistic Nutrition” and the “Greatest Nutritionist of the 20th Century” during his lifetime, but he was a prolific inventor and educator.
From his birth in 1895 to his death in 1967, Dr. Lee filed over 70 patents, worked as a dentist and close friend of Weston Price, developed innovative supplements and theories around chronic disease progression, and became an outspoken educator and advocate for better nutrition by founding the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research.
What shocked me most was that in all of my years reading about holistic health and food, I had never heard of Royal Lee.
As I learned, this is likely no accident. Dr. Lee’s ideas put him at odds with food manufacturers, the medical establishment, and even the FDA. He endured constant character assassination and legal persecution for making the simple assertion that a lack of vitamins and minerals from whole foods leads to disease.
Unfortunately, Royal Lee’s name has been largely forgotten. But through his organization and the work of his colleagues and contemporaries, his work and writings survive.
They reveal that Dr. Lee was not only intelligent but in many ways a visionary. He understood not only vitamins and minerals but how they interacted in the human body for optimal health. He saw the negative impacts of food processing and chemicals and foresaw increases in chronic illnesses such as arthritis and tooth decay for the American public. He predicted problems of autoimmunity and allergies that were rarely seen during his lifetime.
While I continue to study the work of Royal Lee, I want to pass on some of his most important ideas and insights. They’re just as relevant today as they were over 50 years ago when he shared them, if not more so.
Here are the five that struck me most:
#1. Humans require biological complexes, not just vitamins
In the early 20th century, scientists discovered and isolated vitamins for the first time and the supplement industry was born. Companies were suddenly able to offer plausible solutions for malnutrition and deficiencies: pure vitamin C, vitamin D, thiamin, and more.
There was just one problem: the synthetic vitamins didn’t exactly duplicate the effects of natural vitamins and many even had troubling side effects.
The disconnect, according to Dr. Lee, came from the fact that vitamins don’t function in isolation in the body, but as part of biological complexes:
“Synthetic vitamins are pure…Vitamin C is ascorbic acid but in nature, what is Vitamin C? It’s a complex. It’s like breaking down a watch and saying it’s 90% brass, but really, a watch is a timekeeping mechanism. And in nature, every vitamin is a biological mechanism, an enzyme complex, not a chemical…True vitamin C is a complex of ascorbic acid, tyrosinase, vitamin P, and vitamin K.”
In his work as a nutritionist, Dr. Lee emphasized that the best sources of usable vitamins and minerals are raw, whole foods in the right form and proportion for human assimilation. During his career, he developed extracts from raw foods meant to contain all of the vitamins and supporting enzymes the body needed to make use of them.
#2. Nutrient deficiency leads to lowered resistance to infections in both plants and animals
One of the most fascinating areas Dr. Lee studied was the connection between nutrition and resistance to infection. Looking at studies in both plants and animals, Dr. Lee consistently found that nutritional deficiencies lead to greater susceptibility to infection.
Dr. Lee wrote about one particular study published by the Canadian Medical Association by Robertson and Tisdall, titled “Nutrition and Resistance to Disease,” in which researchers concluded: “There is evidence that a lack of almost any of the 32 elements for animal nutrition will result in lowered resistance to infection.”
The study reveals dramatic differences in survival between animals with specific vitamin deficiencies and those without after exposure to a pathogen. For example, only 20% of the test group deficient in vitamin B survived, while 72% of the non-deficient comparison group survived; 57% of the protein deficient test group survived compared to 90% of the non-deficient comparison group.
Dr. Lee’s conclusions on the relationship between nutrient deficiency and disease susceptibility are particularly relevant today, given that soil depletion has lowered the average nutritional value of most crops. As Scientific American’s article “Dirt Poor” shares, the average American would need to eat eight oranges to obtain the same amount of vitamin C his grandparents would have obtained from one. As a result, it’s likely that many of us already suffer from deficiencies that lower our resistance to infection.
Dr. Lee ends his article with the statement that “bearing in mind that when the attacking invader is present in sufficient numbers, the healthy, as well as the sick, may be destroyed, it is the physician’s duty to ask why the infection or infestation developed.”
#3. Food processing destroys much of food’s nutritional value
Throughout his career, Dr. Lee emphasized the nutritive value of whole, raw foods. Whole foods contain the right balance of vitamins and minerals humans need to reap the benefits and in their raw state, they contain intact enzymes that allow the assimilation of all of the vitamins.
Dr. Lee was particularly concerned about the effects of food processing, including the bleaching of flour and pasteurization of milk, which he considered more harmful in the long run than the conditions they are meant to prevent. As he shared in a published article:
“The mineral elements of food fail to be assimilated in the absence of certain enzymes of the phytase and phosphatase group. These enzymes are not found in the human digestive system…The cooking of cereals and pasteurizing of milk and cheese have destroyed the phosphatase in the common food sources of that enzyme, so essential to the assimilation of calcium and iron… After 50 years of this practice, we begin to see that we have destroyed, as a consequence, the teeth and bones of our people. For what else is arthritis other than bone destruction by malnutrition.”
The topics Dr. Lee raised during his lifetime, such as the nutritional value of unpasteurized, raw milk, remain controversial today. Various groups disagree as to whether drinking milk prevents or accelerates osteoporosis, whether the source of the milk (A1/A2) has a substantial effect, whether raw milk poses a public health threat, or whether milk is even good or bad for someone.
Despite the ongoing controversies, Dr. Lee’s fundamental point remains true: bleaching and pasteurization destroy intact enzymes in flour and milk. In fact, in the case of milk, the destruction of the enzyme phosphatase, which allows the body access to the calcium and phosphorus from milk, is considered one of the success criteria of successful pasteurization. Destruction of the intact enzymes in our food, either through pasteurization or high-heat cooking, makes many of the original nutrients present in the foods no longer bioavailable for assimilation by the human body.
What are the long-term impacts of such processing on health? According to Dr. Lee:
“After 50 years of this practice, we begin to see that we have destroyed, as a consequence, the teeth and bones of our people…X-ray examinations show that today there is practically no one free from the progressive changes of arthritis, any more than they are free from tooth disease in some degree.”
It only takes a look around or a trip to the dentist to confirm what Dr. Lee saw well over 50 years ago.
#4. There is a strong link between intestinal health and chronic illness
Far before terms like “microbiome” or “metabolic syndrome” were common topics in health, Dr. Lee discussed the importance of what he called “intestinal hygiene.” He even linked poor intestinal hygiene to problems with detoxification, elimination, and ultimately metabolic imbalance. Here is Dr. Lee’s warning on the effects of an unhealthy intestinal tract:
“The stress is first upon the detoxification system — in the main the liver and kidneys. When these fail to carry the overload, the skin, glands, and other eliminative organs are brought into the situation. The result is metabolic overload, lowered resistance, diminished vitality, and disorganization of the metabolic balance. The result extends far beyond subjective symptoms- gas, bloating, indigestion — and metabolic disaster such as arthritis, allergy, or other diseases may result.”
Dr. Lee foresaw the damage that the emerging “American diet” would have on intestinal health. He spoke out against the white flour, refined sugar, synthetic fats, and overcooked foods that were becoming dietary staples and predicted they would result in a chronically ill population. The prescription for health he offered was at once simple and ahead of its time: “Whole grains, whole meat, whole fruits and vegetables — with all parts intact — should be eaten in as natural a form as possible.”
#5. Aluminum in food and cooking products poses a risk to human health
In the last few years, signs for “aluminum free” cookware and products have increased. You can now find “aluminum free” deodorant, baking powder, and pots and pans, as well as articles detailing the dangers of aluminum as it enters the human body.
But early in the 20th century, Royal Lee was one of the few people sounding the alarm on the dangers of aluminum in household products and foods. As Dr. Lee shares in Report №5 from his foundation:
“It is highly probable that a syndrome of symptoms of phosphorus and calcium deficiency can follow a long continued intake of aluminum salts from aluminum cooking utensils, alum baking powders, or aluminum acetate in perspiration deodorants. Aluminum salts appear to rob other food elements of their phosphorus to form insoluble and nutritionally useless compounds.”
In other words, aluminum robs the body of access to phosphorus and leads to long-term symptoms of phosphorus and calcium deficiency.
Dr. Lee went on to share, “Such serious disorders as ulcers of the stomach and duodenum, cardiovascular disease, heart failure, obesity, and varying degrees of paralysis of the sympathetic nervous system appear to be a consequence of aluminum poisoning.”
Dr. Lee’s description of how aluminum robs the body of calcium and phosphorus has been corroborated since his death. Additionally, aluminum has been linked to an increasing number of serious health issues, including brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s and potentially autism.
Conclusion
Unfortunately, we are living the future predicted by Royal Lee. 60% of Americans suffer from at least one chronic illness and conditions such as arthritis, cancer, and obesity are affecting the population at younger and younger ages. As Dr. Lee put it, despite our surplus of food, we are suffering from diseases of malnutrition.
And unfortunately, as he also predicted, we have attempted to solve most of our problems with chemical therapy rather than nutrition.
Yet the solution Dr. Lee offered decades ago is still within our grasp: a diet of whole, unprocessed foods. Fruits, vegetables, meats, and grains in their most natural forms. When we eat the foods our bodies were designed to eat, we are able to assimilate nutrients and rebuild ourselves back to health.
